Radley Balko on No-Knock Raids

Even if police always got the right house and every raid were performed flawlessly (and that’s obviously not the case), the image of police dressed as soldiers routinely breaking into private homes to serve warrants for non-violent crimes is one we ought to find disturbing. At one time we did. There’s an old Cold War saying, “Democracy means that when there’s a knock at the door at 3am, it’s probably the milkman.” Masked government agents dressed in black barging into private homes in the middle of the night was once an image we associated with totalitarian states. We seem to be troublingly comfortable with it, now.–emphasis added

Indeed we seem to like the fact that police officers are armed with machine guns, tasers, databases, and can enter our homes on even the flimsiest of evidence.

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About Steve VerdonSteve has a B.A. in Economics from the University of California, Los Angeles and attended graduate school at The George Washington University, leaving school shortly before staring work on his dissertation when his first child was born. He works in the energy industry and prior to that worked at the Bureau of Labor Statistics in the Division of Price Index and Number Research.

Comments

If you had nothing to hide you wouldn’t be worried about armed paramilitary thugs breaking the door down and barging into your house in the wee hours of the morning, waving guns around, and shooting any loose pets that look “intimidating”.

If you had nothing to hide you wouldn’t be worried about armed paramilitary thugs breaking the door down and barging into your house in the wee hours of the morning, waving guns around, and shooting any loose pets that look “intimidating”.

Tell that to the family of Ismael Mena, who in 1999 was killed in a no-knock raid in Denver.

His crime?

The police went to the wrong address.

I doubt you would be so glib if you were the one getting killed because the cops had the wrong paperwork.

Perfect? No, and you missed the point. Its there, its pretty obvious, try looking again.

no dint miss the point i was making one->

If you had nothing to hide you wouldn’t be worried about armed paramilitary thugs breaking the door down and barging into your house in the wee hours of the morning, waving guns around, and shooting any loose pets that look “intimidating”.